Night & Demons by David Drake

watching the boy with an expression of bored resignation, that remained unchanged at the sight of a .45 automatic wavering in the thin fist.
    “The men have business to take care of, boy,” Smokie Joe drawled. His fingers drummed absently among the account books. “Why don’t you take your little play toy out and close the door behind you?”
    “You bastard,” the boy said, swinging the pistol full on the slim, seated figure. “You’re the real cause, aren’t you? I ought to use this on you.”
    “Sure, kid,” Smokie Joe agreed, tilting his chair back a little, “but you don’t have the guts. You probably don’t even have the guts to use it on yourself.”
    “Don’t I?” Danny asked. He looked at the baffled rage in his father’s eyes, then back to Smokie Joe’s cold scorn. The pistol seemed to socket itself in his right ear of its own volition.
    “Wait, Danny!” Big Tom cried. He threw his hands out as the gun blasted. The windows shuddered. Danny’s eyeballs bulged and the ruin of his head squished sideways with the shot before his body slumped to the floor.
    Big Tom more stumbled than knelt beside his son. Smokie Joe scooped up the torn page from where it had fallen. “Sure,” he said, “he probably tried curing it himself with what his roommate had leftover from a dose of clap last year. When the doctor told him what he had and what his chances were of getting rid of it now, Danny wouldn’t want to believe him—who would?—and picked up a book to check it out. ‘Lymphogranuloma venereum is a disease of viral origin, usually transmitted by sexual intercourse.’ Well, the only important thing about LGV is that it’s like freckles—it won’t kill you, but you’ll carry it till you die.”
    Mullens was squeezing his son’s flaccid hands. “Normally just blacks get it,” Smokie Joe went on. He squatted beside the wax-faced racketeer. “That isn’t . . . shall we say, a law of God? Give her a chance and a white girl can catch it. And given a chance, she can pass it on to . . . .” Joe’s hand reached past Mullens to unhook Danny’s belt. “ Funny thing—you wouldn’t have expected Betty Jane to have been interested in a man for a long time after Prince Rupert was done with her. Maybe she was too stoned to care, or maybe Danny-boy used a pretty—direct—approach. There’s no real harm done by screwing a girl, is there?” He jerked down Danny’s slacks.
    The boy wore no underpants. His penis was distorted by three knotted sores slimed with yellow pus.
    Big Tom choked and staggered upright. His right hand had wrapped itself around the butt of the automatic. Smokie Joe raised an eyebrow at it. “That’s a mistake, Big Tom. Don’t you hear that siren? When the police arrive, they’re going to think you shot your own son. Better let me take care of it—just tell me to and I’ll fix it so you won’t be bothered. You don’t care how I take care of it, do you?” He stretched out his hand toward the pistol.
    “I’ll see you in Hell first!” Big Tom grated.
    “Sure, Big Tom,” said Smokie Joe. “If that’s how you want it.”
    Big Tom crashed out the six shots still in the pistol’s magazine. Amid the muzzle blasts rolled the peals of Smokie Joe’s Satanic laughter.

AWAKENING

    Many of the SF writers of the 1930s and ’40s were fascinated by Charles Fort’s collections of unexplained phenomena. My friend Manly Wade Wellman told me that F. Orlin Tremaine, the editor of Astounding from 1933 till John W. Campbell took over at the end of 1938, had bought the rights to Fort’s collection Lo! to mine for story ideas. I’m not sure that’s true, but Tremaine certainly did serialize the book. I didn’t see a pulp magazine until one of my high school teachers loaned me a couple issues of Weird Tales, but as a teenager I read lots of SF from the period in anthologies.
    Fort’s technique was to go through scientific journals and note oddities which he then retailed in four